PASADENA, Calif. August 5, 2012 — After eight years of planning and eight months of interplanetary travel, NASA's Mars Science Laboratory pulled off a touchdown of Super Bowl proportions, all by itself. It even sent pictures from the goal line.

The spacecraft plunged through Mars' atmosphere, fired up a rocket-powered platform and lowered the car-sized, 1-ton Curiosity rover to its landing spot in 96-mile-wide (154-kilometer-wide) Gale Crater. Then the platform flew off to its own crash landing, while Curiosity sent out a text message basically saying, "I made it!"

That message was relayed by the orbiting Mars Odyssey satellite back to Earth. A radio telescope in Australia picked up the message and sent it here to NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. When the blips of data appeared on the screens at JPL's mission control, the room erupted in cheers and hugs.

A thumbnail, fisheye view from one of the hazard avoidance cameras on NASA's Curiosity rover shows Martian soil and parts of the spacecraft itself.

Because of the light-travel time between Mars and Earth, throngs of scientists and engineers — along with millions who were monitoring the action via television and the Internet — celebrated Curiosity's landing 14 minutes after it actually occurred.

Even the engineers who drew up the unprecedented plan for the landing admitted that it looked crazy. But the plan actually worked.

Minutes after the news of the landing broke, commentator Allen Chen brought more good news: "We have thumbnails!" Odyssey delivered two pictures showing the view from hazard avoidance cameras mounted on the rover.

The touchdown marked a $2.5 billion triumph for what Doug McCuistion, director of the Mars Exploration Program at NASA Headquarters, called "the Super Bowl of planetary exploration." Curiosity's primary mission is scheduled to last one full Martian year, or almost two Earth years — but scientists hope the nuclear-powered rover will keep going for years longer than that.

This is actual footage from Curiosity's point of view as it made its descent towards Mars. The video is compiled from photos taken at the rate of 4 frames per second. You can see the heat shield falling to the surface at the beginning of the video.

We're going to colonize the planet Mars in the not too distant future. That's the significance of this particular feat. We've figured out how to safely land a one ton vehicular laboratory on our nearest planetary neighbor. We're eventually going to figure out how to make Martian soil grow things. We're going to terraform the planet. Someday they'll be playing baseball on Mars in enclosed structures. The day will come when humans will be watching cartoons on Mars.

Great stuff! Curiosity, beyond being a big lab on wheels, has a nuclear battery which will solve a lot of the problems that happened with the last two rovers (limited hours of operation, sleeping through the winter, slow speed and fear of not "waking up" due to cold). They did go for over 5 years!

Jed Schwartz and I (with a few others) did 30 scenes for Nat Geo's "Five Years on Mars" which was all of the shots for the story of the rover "Spirit." Dan Mass did all of the Opportunity footage for about 50 scenes.

Lots of projection map textures built from actual Mars photographs from the massive JPL collection.

Funny thing was the number of people who asked "How did they get another camera up there?"